Letter From A Flying Machine

[airplane ambiance throughout]

Seventeenth of June, 2006, over the Great Lakes

Dear Edgar,
[violin music in background]
Last week, your father and I hooked up trailers behind our bicycles and trundled you and your sister into them over your initial strident protests. Then we all rode twelve miles along the Hank Aaron Trail down by the ballpark and through the Menomonee River Valley. As we rode along, I marveled, as I often do, at these extraordinary machines, these bicycles which allowed us to cover the distance at a brisk but relaxed clip in a little over an hour. But that is nothing. Courtesy of a very different machine, I am at this moment hurtling eastward eight miles over Ontario, over land and water and little herds of cumulous clouds far below. Further, I am writing these thoughts with yet another machine, a mechanical pencil that would have flipped da Vinci's wig. And who knows what he would have made of the pocket-sized computer that is currently playing a Bach sonata through tiny speakers hidden in my ears? Oh, the gadgetry! To make this recording, these amazing sounds must have leapt from an Italian violin into a German microphone to be rendered as ones and zeros somewhere in the dark of a Japanese hard drive. And I wonder, did Bach write these notes down with a goose quill? With ink made from what? Charcoal, linseed oil, and water? And at this very moment, the smell of baking cookies has filled this flying machine. They are baking cookies in the sky, Edgar. Seriously. In the late 21st century, when you're teleporting from here to there or traveling by personal jetpack or however you get around, will there be cookies involved? But all these wonders, all these machines... all that is nothing, too. We're less than nothing if there is such a thing. Because there are people alive on Earth today who could go twelve miles along the Hank Aaron Trail in a little over an hour on foot. Barefoot, no less. Because the sky is and was full of birds. Because this music must have sparked to life somewhere in the wet dark of Bach's brain. Anyhow, when they come down the aisle, I believe I'll have a cookie. You keep up the good work.
Love,
Uncle Peter

[music ends, ambiance continues]